The present invention relates to emergency escape slides used in conjunction with aircraft, and more particularly, to novel mechanism associated with an aircraft door structure for storing and selectively deploying the escape slide, to a unique over-center linkage for supporting and deploying the escape slide container, and to remote actuating mechanism for the same.
Commercial passenger airplanes are required to carry emergency evacuation equipment. Large commercial airplanes carry emergency evacuation or escape slides that are associated with one or more of the ingress and egress openings in the fuselage. The evacuation slides are sometimes stored in a remote but accessible location and are attached to the passenger deck adjacent the fuselage opening in an emergency situation. Conventionally, the containers for emergency evacuation slides are attached to a fuselage door under normal circumstances and are detached from the door and attached to the passenger deck adjacent the door opening either by direct manipulation of the evacuation slide container or by a manually operated, remote actuating mechanism under emergency conditions.
It is a broad object of the present invention to provide a remotely actuated mechanism for deploying an emergency evacuation slide that is normally attached to a plug-type aircraft door. It is another object of the present invention to provide a slide deployment mechanism with minimum weight, minimum structural compexity, minimum manufacturing and assembly time and cost, and that requires little time to install and maintain. Further objects of the present invention are to provide mechanism for deploying an emergency evacuation slide that can be positively controlled at all times, that is, mechanism that reduces or eliminates the possibility of inadvertent actuation; to provide slide deployment mechanism that will operate under emergency conditions regardless of airplane attitude within certain limits, or regardless of limited structural distortion of the airplane fuselage; to provide slide deployment mechanism that is easy to operate; to provide slide deployment mechanism that has a very few subsystems that are simply interfaced, minimizing undesirable mechanical interaction and providing easy fault isolation; and to provide slide deployment mechanism that will operate independently of an external power source other than gravity.